Newsweek has published a lengthy and sobering look at the environmental effects caused by the production, consumption, and disposal of fast fashion.
On average, Americans are now discarding more than 14 million tons of clothes each year – double the amount they did less than 20 years ago. And despite various charity programs, brand-sponsored recycling initiatives, and secondhand stores, finding a second life for these cast-offs has gotten increasingly more difficult due to the influx of cheaply-made goods from fast fashion retailers.
For consignment and secondhand shops, the clothing’s poor quality and outdated trendy designs result in low resale value. For recycling plants, the demand for reprocessed materials has plummeted due to market saturation. And for charities, the surge in donations has been so great in recent years, there’s now a global deficit of people in need – even historically dependent countries, such as Kenya, have begun to reject imports of used American clothing, especially ones filled with shoddily-made fast fashion pieces.
Ultimately, the vast majority of our unwanted clothes wind up in landfills, where they emit the equivalent of 7.3 million cars worth of greenhouse gases, while decomposing in a process that can take hundreds, if not thousands of years, depending on the fiber. And as long as fast fashion’s rapid buy-trash-buy cycle remains the norm, the problem is only going to get worse.
To read more about the fast fashion waste crisis, head over to Newsweek.
